Basic. Not that it was ever called that, but the B programming language
was a simplified version of BCPL, in the name of
which the B stood for Basic. B was a typeless language like BCPL, and
like BCPL also it is remembered today for its genealogical connection to
C, explained at the Algol
entry.

B was created in 1970 by Ken Thompson for the first Unix system on the PDP-7.
A manual from 1972, for a PDP-11/Unix-11 implementation, is
served by Dennis M.
Ritchie online. From the abstract there: ``B is a computer language
intended for recursive, primarily non-numeric applications typified by system
programming. B has a small, unrestrictive syntax that is easy to compile.
Because of the unusual freedom of expression and a rich set of operators, B
programs are often quite compact.''

The ``rich set of operators'' included & and * for pointer manipulation
(pointers were first introduced PL/I) and the
shorthand assignment operators ===, =!=, =<, =<=, =>, =>=, =&,
=|, =<<, =>>, =+, =-, =%, =*, and =/. [In B, the result of the
binary relational and (in)equality operators was an integer 0 or 1.] Except
for the first six, these were incorporated into C. (Of course, === is now used
as a comparison operator in many object-oriented languages.)

The earliest versions of C maintained the same symbols that had been used in B
for the shorthand assignment operators, in ``=<op>'' form. This
led to problems with symbols that represent unary operations in addition to the
binary operations understood in the shorthand assignments (viz., &, -, and
*, as well as what one might call a unary identity operator: the optional +
immediately preceding a numeric literal). For example,

x=-1

may look like an ordinary assignment of -1 to x, but in B (and obsolete
versions of C) it simply decrements x. Similar problems occur with expressions
like x=--y. By the time K&R was published
(1978), the =<op> symbols had been flipped to unambiguous
<op>= form. In that book, the older form is described (Appendix
A, sec. 17) following this sentence: ``Although most versions of the compiler
support such anachronisms, ultimately they will disappear, leaving only a
portability problem behind.''

If that manual is to be believed, identifiers (variable names and such) were
slightly more general than those of C in the following surprising way. In both
languages, identifiers must begin with an alpha character and continue with
alphanumeric characters, where the alphanumeric set consists of alpha
characters and digits. In C, alphas are the 52 alphabetic characters (26
upper- and lower-case ASCII letters) and underscore. In B, alphas included
those characters and backspace?! This gives one the advantage of
creating identifiers with overstruck characters, but on those
displays where that would have worked, it could have been difficult to
distinguish distinct variable names constructed with different sequences of the
same characters. (E.g., an AB with an I overstruck on each letter could be any
of A^HIB^HI, AB^H^HII, I^HAI^HB, or five similar sequences, not to mention
identifiers with more than two ^H. Since spaces are not legal identifier
characters, something like A ^H^HII^HB would be forbidden. Thus,
identifiers with more than two ^H would either be shorter than they appear,
like I^HAI^HB^H, or they would have extra extra double-struck characters as in
AB^H^HII^H^HIB.)

Programming languages that manipulate strings are usually written using the
same characters that constitute the strings. B was no exception. The
manipulation requires one or more delimiters, and these delimiters cannot
represent themselves. One approach to this problem uses, say, '' to represent
an apostrophe within single-quoted strings. This is the approach in Pascal,
and is apparently related to the absence of zero-length strings in that
language. This
PL/I (F) language reference volume gives the example of

'SHAKESPEARE''S ''''HAMLET'''''

to represent SHAKESPEARE'S ''HAMLET'' ...

It is also inconvenient or impossible, depending on other syntax, to allow line
breaks to represent themselves in strings. There is only one efficient general
solution for representing delimiters, nonprinting characters, and any other
characters that cannot appear within string literals: escapes. One character
(which in turn also cannot represent itself and must be escaped) is chosen to
introduce escape sequences that represent the parts of string literals that
cannot represent themselves. In B (as in BCPL and presumably
CPL) that escape character was the asterisk, and
these escapes were defined:

*0 null
*e end-of-file
*( {
*) }
*t tab
** *
*' '
*" "
*n new line

The B language borrowed /* ... */ commenting from PL/I. This continued in C.
The // style of comment was not originally part of standard C but of standard
C++, though it was recognized by many C compilers.
The // comment was eventually included in the C standard: ISO 9899:1999.
C# has a further twist: the token /// introduces
XML comments.

b.

Abbreviation of Hebrew ben or
Aramaicbar (`son, son of')
used in patronymics, like Arabic ibn.

In ancient times (like, increasingly from 6c. BCE to 7 c. CE, when Islam
made Arabic the common language), Aramaic was the lingua franca of the
Middle East, and quite influential (e.g., both of the early alphabetic
scripts of India have been hypothesized to have
originated from an Aramaic form of the Semitic alphabets).

(Aramaic survives as Syriac, and as a
liturgical language in Judaism; some biblical texts, such as Esther, are
written in the Aramaic language. A ketuba or contract [implicitly: of
marriage] may be written in Hebrew or Aramaic. Hebrew today is written
not using the original Hebrew alphabet but an Aramaic one that was adopted.
Also Aramaic is
explained here.)

The word barbarian entered most European languages from
Greek, where it originally had the sense of
`foreign' (adjective bárbàros, `foreign,' and various
related words). Somewhat interestingly, there does not appear to be an
Indo-European (IE) origin for the word. (On the
other hand that is true of much of the Greek vocabulary.) Various etymologies
have been proposed, but the gentle reader need not entertain them, as the
Stammtisch has already decided that the origin is
in the bar of eastern patronymics. (Note that longer ancestries can be
indicated by multiple bars, in the style
of ... son of ... son of ....)

Another etymology, no longer approved by the Stammtisch, supposed that
barbarian is imitative of the language of foreigners, ``brrr-brrr'
to the foreign ear. Once, Gary and I were prating about the sound of Chinese,
and it occurred to Gary to ask Jun (from China) what English sounded like to
him. Gary explained that to us, Chinese sounds like ``ching chang chung.''
Jun replied that to him, English sounded like ``sa se so'' [the vowels in both
quotes are my best recollection after 20 years, but I'm sure of the consonants].
FWIW, as we say.

There have even been claims for an origin in the Latin for `bearded,' but
the Greek term does not correspond. Okay, now you can read the
Barbara entry.

B, b

Be. Chatese, texting abbreviation.

b.

German: bei, `at, along, among.' Cognate of English by.

B

The number of Binding neutrons in a nucleus. The notion of binding
neutrons was common enough in the 1940's, but I don't think I ever encountered
it in the nuclear and elementary particle physics courses I took in the late
1970's. The idea is that a typical light nucleus that is stable has an atomic
number (Z, the proton count) about equal to its neutron
number (N). As the atomic number increases, the
electrostatic repulsion between protons lowers the nuclear binding energy by
an amount proportional to Z2/A (exactly in some simple models, and
to a good approximation in fact). Hence, heavy nuclei tend to have an excess
of neutrons over protons. That excess was designated the number of binding
neutrons:

The Bishop initially nearer the Queen (Q) is
indicated QB, for Queen's Bishop, the one on the other side KB, for King's
Bishop.

These are not exactly equivalent. King's Bishop and Queen's Bishop
designate files on a chessboard. (A file
is a column of eight squares, ``vertical'' in the standard representation
that shows the original positions of the white pieces along the bottom of
the board -- viewed from high above the white side.) Bishop can designate
either of those two files, as well as one of the four pieces called a Bishop.
KB and QB are the files immediately adjacent to the King's and Queen's
files. (To right and left, respectively, in the standard representation.)

As it happens, however, the KB and QB, if you wanted to use those
designations for the pieces originally in those files, would be easy to
determine: the B originally in KB always stands on a square of its own
color (i.e., white KB stays on white squares, etc.). The other
Bishop stays on the opposite color.

This property of a Bishop's movement serves as a model to illustrate a
general physical phenomenon: Stated in physics language, that is: details
of the law of motion gives rise a conservation law. In the case of the
Bishop, whose law of motion constrains it to move only by integer steps
along diagonals, the conserved quantity is the color of the square on which
it stands. Each side begins the game with one Bishop that travels the
white squares, and one that travels the black.

In particle mechanics, the most famous conservation laws are those of momentum
(p) and energy, which arise from integrations over
position and time, respectively.

The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play
is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that
he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for
ignorance.

I'm sorry, I guess I don't really have a lot to say about boron. You're
becoming very sleepy...when I snap my... Actually, I'm becoming very
sleepy. Yaaaa, aaaaw, wn. The French call boron
bore. Even Tom Lehrer didn't mention it until the second line of the
third verse of his famous song. Try the BN entry.

B

Bravo. Not an abbreviation here, just the FCC-recommended ``phonetic
alphabet.'' I.e., a set of words chosen to represent alphabetic
characters by their initials. You know, ``Alpha Bravo Charlie ... .''
The idea behind the choice is to have words that the listener will be able
to guess at or reconstruct accurately even through noise (or narrow
bandwidth, like a telephone). Hence, ``Book'' would be no good because
it might be heard as ``Took.''

``Buffalo'' should work as well.

B

Bunt. Lay it down.

B

Loosely speaking, this is called the magnetic field. Strictly speaking,
it's the ``Magnetic Induction.'' H is the magnetic field. I haven't
a clue what the letter stands for.

BA, B.A.

Bachelor of Arts. A receipt for payment of four years' tuition and fees.
Sometimes you can get the same receipt at a 25% discount, but that may
require actual work.

The Cranberries have a song called ``Bosnia'' on their third album (``To
The Faithful Departed''). Their vocalist Dolores O'Riordan (somebody
must like her voice, I guess) takes slight metrical advantage of the fact
that one can pronounce the name of the capital, Sarajevo, in four syllables
(spelling pronunciation) or three (Sarevo, usual pronunciation). I think
she gets about a half a dozen syllables out of Bosnia.

According to the liner notes, Dolores believes it is a ``human impossibility
to obtain complete peace of mind in this dimension. There's too much suffering
and pain...'' She's right; I'll return the CD.

I think it'd've been cool if they had named their organization the British
Academy of Artistic And Aesthetic Dentistry. Then the members could be
sayin' ``we baaaad, we so baaaad.'' I mean, it's not as if dentistry suffers
from a surfeit of cool.

baaad

Not good at all; ovine censure.

The English supergroup Bad Company was formed
in 1973 and named after the 1972 movie of the same name, which was a favorite
of lead singer Paul Rodgers. On the radio in 2009 I heard an interview with
him or some other of the original members of the group, and that person claimed
that there was a double entendre involved, with bad understood in
the positive sense it had developed in slang. He claimed it was a bit of an
inside joke, since that bit of American slang had not yet jumped the pond when
the group was formed.

Title of a 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). The novel satirizes
middle-class conformity, dreary mediocrity, repressed sexuality, bourgeois
insincerity, occasionally insipid sentimentality, nonspontaneity, and every
otherity that we hold dear. It traces a few years in the life of George E.
Babbitt, represented as typical, and that name has since been applied to his
perceived species.

From one point of view, Babbitt is less an examination of life among the
proles than a revelation of the author's fashionable and insensitive contempt
for the modest but productive strivings of steady, ordinary people. In the US,
that contempt was especially fashionable in the roaring twenties. I think the
Great Depression reminded people of just how truly uncool it is to be poor, and
perhaps made prosperity less intellectually suspect.

The 1950's saw some rising concern about bland conformity. A signal event was
the publication in 1955 of Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit, which shares some theme and plot elements with
Babbitt. The novel was made into a movie (1956) starring Gregory Peck
and Jennifer Jones. The late DeForest
Kelley had a bit part as a medic. He went on to greatness as Star Trek's Dr.
McCoy -- ``Bones.'' Peck's man in the gray flannel suit was wooden.

The 1960's eventually allayed concerns, rightly or wrongly I'm not sure, that
the country was going to hell in the fatal-conformity handbasket. Zeitgeist
fluctuations since then have included waves of concern about the nation's
spiritual health and even about the effects of corporate culture, but
Babbittry isn't really an issue with traction any more. A mild version, or
perhaps a cowardly metonymic version, persisted as contempt for suburban sprawl, q.v.

Back when the famously mediocre J. Danforth Quayle was Vice-President, he had a
large retinue of staff whose entire job was preventing him from looking quite
so stupid, particularly as the national news media had him marked for
reputation extinction. Quayle required his staff to read Peoplemagazine. I require you to visit the
Bollywood entry.

Babbitt, or a Babbitt, is damnably without hard edges, bland.

Babbitt metal

A soft white alloy of tin invented by Isaac Babbitt (1790-1862). The
original alloy was composed of tin, antimony, and copper in the (mass) ratio
50:5:1 or 50:4:1. By the end of the nineteenth century, the term came to be
applied to any soft white alloy used for bearings and low-friction linings
(these are partly overlapping categories), including Sn:Cu 9:1 and Pb:Sb 4:1.

To Babbitt, or Babbitt-line, was to line with Babbitt metal. Later in the
twentieth century, there was a chemical-engineering explosion of new industrial
materials, and the term seems to have fallen out of use.

BABesch

Bulletin Antieke Beschaving (Leyden).
English title: Annual Papers on Classical Archaeology.
``[P]ublished annually since its foundation in 1926 by A.W. Byvanck. One of
its main objectives is to provide a forum for archaeologists whose research
and fieldwork focus on classical archaeology. Its aim is to present such
studies as are likely to be of interest to any student in this subject. This
established journal publishes original research papers, short notes of wider
archaeological significance and book reviews. It is open to contributors from
any country and will publish papers in English, French, German and Italian.''
(Not Dutch?) Currently published by
Peeters. ISSN 0165-9367.

BABT is a private, independent company and the leading telecommunications
approval body in Europe. BABT operates internationally and in addition to its
regulatory role offers a wide range of services and practical consultancy to a
growing list of clients in the telecoms and other industries.

Established in 1982 as a private company, BABT operates a
commercially-oriented range of approvals services to help customers bring their
terminal equipment to the market. BABT is the UK centre of technical expertise
for regulatory and voluntary assessment of all types of terminal equipment.
Formal appointments include the Approvals Authority for telecommunications
terminal equipment in the UK, a Notified Body in Europe under the LVD, EMC
and TTE Directives, and a Competent Body under the EMC Directive.

Babinet's Principle

The diffraction patterns projected from a complementary pair of screens
are the same.

British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.
Founded in 2003, it's a member of the International Federation of Esthetic
Dentistry (IFED) as well as an affiliate of the
American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry (AACD). There
also exist American and British Academies of Esthetic (and Aesthetic, resp.)
Dentistry (AAED and BAAD),
and they too belong to IFED. I don't know what the difference is. If I had
to, I'd guess that cosmetic dentistry does aesthetic dental work that you can
remove before you go to bed.

The basketball backboard was originally introduced (1893) as a barrier to
keep spectators in balcony seats from interfering with shots. Players quickly
began to use them in the ways familiar today, and they eventually remained even
when nearby seats -- and the original purpose of the backboards -- were absent.
(I've read that
when the nearby seats were removed, there was an original feint in the
direction of removing the backboards, but player protests brought them back.
Maybe so, but maybe that was just a management head-fake.) Backboards were
originally made of chicken wire; wooden backboards became mandatory in 1904,
and glass backboards were permitted from 1909,
according to this page.

I meant: more information later. It's later now. The guitars go for
between $500 and $1000, which seems rather steep for a silent musical
instrument. They do include hardware: each guitar comes with a standard sort
of head, nut, neck, fretboard, saddle, and bridge
-- so the strings aren't loose -- you can play it -- but it has no sound box or
even a solid body like a typical electric, but just a narrow extension about as
wide as the neck, corresponding to the portion of a normal
guitar body (specifically its top plate, minus
sound hole) underneath the strings. Turns out it can be heard through
headphones. The idea is to use it for practicing where the sound would be
unwelcome.

There are steel-string and nylon-string versions; both use piezoelectric
pickups. The electronics, including signal shaping but (of course) not a power
amplifier are built into the body. With a separate amp you can use it for
performance. If you aren't Carlos Santana or Jimi or one of those, then you'll
appreciate that without a body, the feedback effects are substantially reduced.

In addition to the parts described above, the instruments come with a couple of
things that are not strictly necessary. One thing is a frame, in the form of
the outline of a guitar body (cutaway style). This is partly decorative, but
mostly it makes it possible to practice while holding the instrument as one
normally holds a guitar.

The reason I mention the silent guitars at this entry is that the steel-string
version includes a pickguard. The pickguard normally protects the top plate of
the guitar. This guitar has a pickguard that protects the air where there
would normally be a top plate.

An acronym that coincides in spelling (and normally also in pronunciation)
with a word that was in use before the acronym. It is often stipulated that
the pre-existing word be of nonacronymic origin, but this does not seem
essential and would spoil my SNAFU entry in its
current form.

Backronyms sometimes have rather recherché expansions shoe-horned
into desired pre-existing words. (You know, in the version of the Cinderella
story originally published by the appropriately surnamed
Grimm brothers, Cinderella's step-sisters cut off
parts of their feet in order to get them to fit into the golden slipper. If it
had been a glass slipper, of course, the prince would have noticed immediately
instead of at first riding off deceived with each of them in turn.) Once upon
a time, at a doughnut shop called -- oh, never mind; a good example of
shoe-horning is HABIT. A true story in which the
step-sisters were really ugly, with a happy ending that -- just like the fairy
tale -- does not involve a backronym, is told at
KERMIT's entry.

Fiction is not always part of the backronym story. In fact, most backronyms
involve no pretense beyond the implied sugestion that the acronym expansion
really isn't so much of a stretch. They might be qualified as ``open-handed''
backronyms. Some backronyms are really ordinary words, possibly used in a new
sense, to which acronymic expansions have been retroactively ascribed. See
stealth backronym. For kicks, compare
notarikon (in its precise sense). Hmmnym...
maybe we should try this again.

backronym

Blatantly Ahistorical Cranky, Kooky, Ridiculous, Or NonsensicallY
Maladapted-expansion-using acronym. Backronym in this sense is a kind of
backronym, making backronym an autonym.

Wednesday I was in a room with eighteen other men (yes, yes, women are
allowed, but none came) and this topic came up, and no one tittered or laughed
or probably even thought of any untoward meaning. I'm also pretty sure no one
shouted out ``like Kim Kardashian.'' (I only thought of it later.) This entry
is here to provide an opportunity for the word untoward to appear and
not slip out of common usage, and also so I can mention
``heavy holes.'' There.

Oh, alright. The discussion was about IC packaging
strategies. Unless there's a good reason not to do so, which there oftentimes
unfortunately is, you prefer to perform successive processing steps on a single
side (the ``top'') of a wafer or a piece of it. (By ``wafer'' I mean a
semiconductor wafer about a half a millimeter thick, with various much thinner
layers of various materials variously patterned on top, like a burnt pizza, but
rather thinner and with many more toppings, and able to perform logic
operations.) One thing that is hardly possible to do from the top is to thin
the wafer. To do that, you flip the chip and thin from the back. Backside
grinding, of course, is mechanical thinning of the flipped chip. (You can also
thin by etching, but a deep etch is uneven.)

backward spelling

A disfigure of speech. A crutch for the neologistically lame. It is
entirely age-appropriate that the word yob arose by backward spelling of
boy. Neologisms are often concocted by backward spelling in order to
contrive or complete a palindrome, but you can
follow links to that after reading through to the end of the next entry.

Backward spellings seem to be especially common in electrical engineering, but
we won't spell out any untoward conclusions from that (in any direction).
(OTOH, if you're interested in electrical engineers' language obliviousness,
there's a relevant entry just preceding
this one. Following this entry there's a brief...

As Stanley Yelnats isn't discussed elsewhere in this glossary, I'll note that
it's the name of the protagonist of Louis Sachar's Holes, which won the
Newberry medal for distinguished contribution to literature for children. I'd
like to point out that it was originally intended as adult literature, but won
in the children's category anyway. That ought to give you an idea of how
puerile backward spelling is. However,
I don't know for a fact that Holes was originally written for adults.
Contrariwise, I don't know that it wasn't. So maybe it was. That's logic.

Backward spelling is related to palindromy, of course.
Palindromes are text strings whose letter
sequences are unchanged when written backwards. If you have to coin a new word
to create a palindrome, however, you're cheating. In order to develop your own
ability to distinguish good palindromes from bad, study the examples at the
Yreka entry.

bacrim

Bandas Criminales emergentes. `Emerging criminal
bands.' They're also called bandas emergentes en Colombia (`emerging
bands in Colombia'). They are paramilitary organized crime syndicates that
operate throughout Colombia as well as in neighboring areas, particularly of
Panama and Venezuela, funded by the illegal drug trade and vying for control of
it. The term seems to have been coined in 2012. If Mexico is any guide, they
will last too long to continue to be regarded as an ``emerging'' phenomenon.

I wish the government and law-abiding Colombians luck, but the reason I put
this entry here has to do with the grammatical number and gender of
bacrim. The word is construed as plural and also sometimes as singular.
It's necessarily feminine, following the gramatical gender of bandas.
It's a bit odd that it can be construed as singular, but since the acronym was
formed as a plural not ending in s, and is not a proper noun, it's unclear how
to back-construct a singular form. What's weird about the plural is that since
the majority of plurals in Hebrew end in -im, it looks weirdly like a borrowed
Hebrew plural. Of course, the -im applies to Hebrew masculine nouns, so an
authentic borrowing would have looked more like * los bacarim than
las bacrim.

The asterisk in the last sentence is a standard symbol in linguistics, widely
used as a kind of subjunctive-mood marker. In discussions of grammar it
typically precedes an example of incorrect usage (a sort of contrary-to-fact
subjunctive). In historical linguistics it typically indicates a hypothetical
reconstruction that it may with luck be possible to confirm (an unattested form
in Old English, say, or 18th century slang), or not (a reconstructed form in
PIE, say). The use in historical linguistics is for content of a type that
appears in the apodosis of a conditional statement (implicit here), associated
with the the marker ``would.'' [This is a common function of the subjunctive
in various Indo-European languages that have a well-developed subjunctive. In
English, the word ``subjunctive'' is avoided in discussions of both protasis
and apodosis, and the discussion is framed in terms of the structure of
conditional sentences.] As it happens, the linguistic asterisk in the
preceding paragraph marks a contrary-to-fact conditional.

It is poor practice to put a space between an asterisk and the element
following it in C code, but it's okay in linguistics (excluding /*, of
course). Some grammarians even put it after the offending form (but on the
same line).

Back in the 1960's, the use of bad in a special sense of good
became a common element of slang. For all I know, it may have been a part of
the American black argot for some time before then. In 2005 or so I noticed a
glossy magazine called
King, aimed at an
``urban'' readership, which decribes itself as ``the illest men's magazine
ever.'' I've since encountered ``ill'' used elsewhere in a positive sense.

BAD

Bond-Angle Distribution. I'd like to report here that GOOD stands for
GOniOmetric Distribution. But even though I have, it doesn't, which is bad and
not good. It would make BAD a special kind of GOOD.

Business ADministration. I love it, and I didn't even have to make it up
myself! (One attestation is among course codes at the University of Oklahoma,
Norman (UO).

Bad boys umm... our young girls behind Victory Garden walls

One WWI-era version of the standardish mnemonic
for the resistor color code. It is a fundamental law of the universe that
all attempts to create a different mnemonic result in something that is at
least three decibels less acceptable for publication in family-oriented
electronics literature such as this glossary. So you'll have to use your
imagination, you filthy-minded letch.

Another common version gets into specific allegations: ``Bad boys umm... our
young girls but Violet gives willingly for gold and
silver.'' This has the advantage that the mnemonics for violet, gold, and
silver are Violet, gold, and silver, respectively. (An extra gold or silver
band indicates 5% or 10% tolerance. No band indicates 20% tolerance. I mean
that literally and also the way you understood it. My high school electronics
teacher, Mr. Coulter, was in the Signal Corps over in 'Nam before he entered
the teaching racket. One of his characteristic sayings was ``ten percent is
good enough for government work.'')

Another color-code mnemonic that I suppose is from before my time goes ``Bad
Beer Rots Our Young Guts But Vodka Goes Well.''

German noun (masculine) meaning `bathing suit.'
(Normally refers to a woman's or girl's bathing suit. A boy's or man's bathing
suit is called by the feminine noun Badehose, `swim trunks.')
Cf.Anzug.

At the beginning of the 1978 spring break,
I drove some of our neighbors from
Apt. 235 down to the bus stop on the main campus. Looking forward to a
week in Florida, one of them (let's call her ``Serena'') was remembering how,
when she floated on her back in the water, her toes stuck above the surface.
There are many possible interpretations for this
buoyancy phenomenon, and the correct
one is that she unconsciously bent her legs so that her toes would stick out
instead of her belly. This has nothing to do with this entry, but as
she inadvertently revealed her secret insecurities, it occurred to me that she
might have forgotten to pack something. So I asked, ``did you bring your
bathing suit?'' She replied ``What?'' So I again called back, loudly enough
to be heard all the way back to the back seat of my sedan, ``Did you bring your
bathing suit?!'' Came the reply: `What?'' We did another iteration, and
finally I exploded, ``Hast du deinen Badeanzug gebracht?!''
(Don't worry -- Serena didn't take offense at my use of the familiar du,
at least partly because she didn't know German.) The take-home here is that
German is really a perfect language for when you're angry
(verärgert). As the expression goes, one does not speak German --
one spits it.

Bad Education

The name, in English-language release, of Pedro Almodóvar's 2004
movie La Mala
Educación. The movie, like most of Almodóvar's work
since the 1990's, is too complicated for summary. But among other things, it
tells the story of two schoolboys abused by a priest in Franco-era Spain. So
it's about bad educational experiences, but the Spanish title is a pun that did
not translate well: the title is a standard expression meaning `bad manners.'

In the movie, the two boys are grown up and have become a movie director and
actor. Nobody thinks that this is just too pat? The actor has written a story
about their childhood love; the director films it. It's not clear, evidently
by design, what part is flashbacks in the frame narrative and what part
movie-within-the-movie. A brilliant Spanish director who grew up in the Franco
era can think of nothing better to do than make a movie about a Spanish
director who grew up in the Franco era and makes a movie about it, and then
everybody goes and complains about the unfairness of American movies (filmed in
Canada, with Australian actors, by Japanese-owned companies) taking over the
world. How rude! (¡Qué maleducado!)

bad fashion sense

Much cheaper than a fine wardrobe, and can't be ruined by spilled fluids
[cf. nylon (PA), to say nothing of silk].

In a dystopia like that described in Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), it may be difficult to identify the bad
guys' organization, but the four ministries of Oceania are Minipax, Miniplenty,
Minitrue and MiniLuv (cf.Mindef).

Bad Taste Records

A record label based in Lund,
Sweden. Along with Burning Heart Records, it was one of the first labels to be
established in the Swedish punk rock and punk/hardcore scene in the early
1990's. I know because Wikipedia tells me so, but I don't propose to find out
what it means. Here in northern Indiana, there's a trio that calls itself
``Orphan Donors.'' I think maybe their music is punky or punkish or possibly
punkous, but I'm fairly certain their group name is in poor taste. Their bass
player seems to be increasingly popular with the babes, so I guess they're
successful at some level. Is the previous sentence in bad taste? Does it set
a bad taste record? No?

Okay, back on topic. ``The name of the label
originated from the 1987 movie
Bad Taste directed and
produced by Peter Jackson'' (a cult science-fiction comedy horror film, it
seems fair to say). That's awfully modest of them, if that's their claim. If
you're going to sell punk rock records, you
could claim that it was the logical name that simply occurred to you.

There are also Bad Taste records from an Icelandic record label that is or was
``Bad Taste Ltd.'' More about them at their original name,
Smekkleysa.

Bulgarian Academy of Esthetic Dentistry. The ``-bg'' is there so you know
it's BulGarian, and not BelGian.

BAEO

Black Alliance for Education
Options. A group favoring vouchers.
The Democratic party and black civil rights leaders are generally opposed to
vouchers; the first reason given is that it would take money away from public
schools. A larger percentage of blacks than of whites favors vouchers. One
reason given is that it would threaten to take money away from public
schools, and so motivate them.

Blacks are the one large population group in the US in which self-described
conservatives substantially outnumber self-described (or registered)
Republicans. (We have a black
Republicans entry under construction.)

The browser you are using ([your browser here])
is incompatible with the BAFTA website.

In order to bypass this, you'll have to disable JavaScript interpretation.

The French have a variety of motion picture awards.
These include les César du Cinéma (Cesars in the more
efficient English tongue) awarded by
l'Académie des Arts et
Techniques du Cinéma. (By the way, if you don't know how to
speak French, then a good first approximation to
French pronunciation is to pretend it's English, which it is, and pronounce it
with a tres fake, over-the-top French
accent.) These Cesars correspond most closely to the Oscars, although
obviously they have no prestige since France hasn't
made any decent movies in sixty or seventy years. (The top prize at Cannes is
the Palme d'Or, presumably in memory of the assassinated Scandinavian
prime minister). Note that unlike les anglophones, who only award
prizes for movies that flatter our collective conceits, the French also give
awards to movies that are simply pretentious bores.

BAG

Bankaktiengesellschaft.
A German word that may be literally translated as a common noun meaning `bank
stock company,' but which is really just the name of a particular financial
institution -- something like ``Bank Corporation.''

Bulletin de l'association Guillaume
Budé.
Guillaume Budé (1467-1540) was a French Hellenist. The first significant one of the
modern era -- a sort of Plutarch or Erasmus figure.

BAHA

British Association of Hospitality
Accountants. ``Foil-wrapped complimentary chocolate mint on pillow?
Check. Bible in night-table drawer? Check. Air
conditioner set to freezing? Check. Message from management explaining
how to save the environment by indicating that towels need not be washed?
Check. End of toilet-paper roll folded neatly into a
chevron? Check. Uh-oh: no paper torus enclosing the toilet seat!''

The British Association of Hospitality Accountants (BAHA) was formed in 1969
with the aim of bringing together those professionals who were involved in
financial management and control within the hotel industry. Since inception
the membership has expanded to include systems specialists, hospitality
consultants and accountants, bankers, investment analysts, property
professionals, academics and others who retain an interest in the hotel,
catering and leisure sectors.

See? Just like I said.

BAIAS

Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society.

Bailey's formula

Age in months = number of teeth erupted + 6.

Obviously, this has to be an overestimate before six months and an
underestimate eventually (age 4+). In practice, it seems to be an
underestimate in most of the relevant age range.

bailout

An opportunity to learn the useful lesson that one should live within one's
means, without the inconvenience of having lived beyond them in the first
place.

Oh sure, there are other definitions, but we prefer to be upbeat. It's like
getting to savor the bitter aftertaste without having to take all the fattening
calories in the initial draft.

The theory behind bailouts as enlightened self-interest is that everyone's
ultimately in the same boat, so the bailers-out are really just bailing
themselves out. The problem with this is that with a boat so big the buckets
never reach the gunwales, and just end up get emptied elsewhere on board.

Baires, BAires

Buenos Aires, Argentina. This abbreviation is widely used and pronounced
(in Spanish) as spelled -- ``Baires'' (something
like ``BYE-ress'' or more like ``BYE-dess'' in English). It refers to the
city. The city happens to be located in a (much larger, in area) province also
called Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires was originally the name only of the port,
100 km or so upriver from the bay, but the name was eventually extended to both
the city and the province.

Much of the early post-colonial history of Argentina consisted of a power
struggle between Buenos Aires, which sought a national government with strong
central control (based in BAires, of course -- the capital), and the provinces,
which sought a more federal system. I was born in BAires, so I am a
porteño or bonaerense.
Nowadays, of course, all that old history is forgotten, and when people from
the provinces refer to the unusual accent, hustle, or alleged arrogance of
bonaerenses it is of course only with affection, admiration, or
facetiousness, respectively.

A British invasion of Argentina, early in its independence, was foiled by a
British lack of river navigators familiar with the Rio de la Plata; the
invading group ran aground. So I remember. There may not be a national multiplication table or
geometry, but potomography is another story.

Both the river Plate and the Viceroyal colony of Argentina were named after the
silver that the Spanish hoped to find there. If they had understood something
of geology they would have realized immediately that the gold and silver would be found (as it was, mostly)
along the Pacific coast. If you want to avoid
making the same mistake in your next imperial adventure, see the
pluton entry.

baited breath

Look, despite what you read in the stupid newspapers and illiterate
websites, this is a misspelling. It's ``bated breath.'' ``Bated'' here is an
old participle related to abated -- it means stopped. ``Bated breath''
is breath that has been stopped, held. ``With bated breath'' means ``while
holding [your] breath'' or ``in breathless anticipation.'' ``Baited breath''
means nothing except that you can't spell.

baited breath

Oh gaaaawd honey, let's lock lips. What is it -- olive,
sunflower, habanero? That vegetable oil on your
breath is just irresistible!

A napped fabric resembling felt. Today it is used to cover gaming and pool
tables.

The word comes from the Frenchbaies, the
plural feminine form of the bai, `bay-colored,' from
Latinbadius. Bay, in case you forgot, or in
case you couldn't forget, is a reddish or golden brown. Presumably that was
the original color of this cloth, back in the sixteenth century, but apparently
no one bothered to record this obvious fact. At least, it seems no one
recorded otherwise. Nowadays the most common color of baize is green (many
dictionaries describe it as ``bright green''; they may take a dim view of the
usual green), but I've played on blue, champagne-colored, and
beer-darkened-green pool tables. (Not all at the same time.)

bajo latín

Spanish for the literary Latin of the Middle
Ages. Literally, of course, the term means `low Latin,' and when the term was
coined, bajo was certainly intended to imply `bad.' If you need a quick
short translation of the term that will be correctly misunderstood, use `Vulgar
Latin.'

BAK

Back At Keyboard. Shaves an entire time-consuming letter off your
chat message. Cf.AFK.

.bak

BAcK-up. Filename extension.

Baker

Family pseudonym of Niels and
Aage Bohr
when they participated in the Manhattan project. Their pseudonyms became so
well known that at public conferences Niels Bohr was often referred to as
Nicholas Baker. Niels Bohr escaped occupied Denmark (.dk, q.v.) by boat after dissolving his gold Nobel Prize medal in acid. (I suppose he made
AuNO3 dust.) After the war,
he separated out the gold and had the medal recast. Alan Turing converted much
of his savings into two silver bars, which he buried at separate locations.
When he tried to dig them up after the war, he couldn't find one of the
locations, while the other had been buried when a bridge was constructed. When
Enrico Fermi sailed from Rome to Stockholm to pick up his Nobel, he avoided
storage problems by just continuing on to New York.
When Einstein locked the door of his house in Germany, as he was leaving for a stay in the US, he
bade his wife take a final look, because it was the last time they would ever
see it.

Another thing about Turing. Among the public at large, he is probably best
known today for proposing an ``imitation game'' now known as the Turing Test.
The test is to see whether in a conversation -- conducted across a suitably
anonymizing medium -- a computer program can fool a human into thinking it is
another human.

Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff Relation

Given two operators A and B which commute with their
common commutator
( [A,[A,B]] = [B,[A,B]] = 0 ),
the relation holds:

exp(A+B) = exp(A) exp(B) exp(½[A,B]) .

Bakerloo

Refers not to a point on a surface, but to a line underneath.
Specifically, a London rail line that connects the Baker Street station and
the Waterloo station. (It ran a bit further to southeast, and has since been
extended, mostly to the northeast on surface tracks.) When it opened (all
underground) on March 10, 1906, it was called the Baker Street & Waterloo
Railway, but the popular nickname Bakerloo was soon adopted as its
official name. (I'm cribbing here from the extensive
Wikipedia entry.)

I've only put this entry in so the glossary can begin to have a respectable
representative sample of blends. No abbreviation reference work should be so
abbreviated as to be without that. This case demonstrates that a single
unstressed syllable makes a good emulsifier. The fact that Baker Street and
Waterloo are both dactyls (see under meter) probably helps, as does the presence
of a letter a in both first syllables, though they're pronounced differently.
What probably helps the most is that ``Baker Street and Waterloo Railway'' is a
mouthful.

Wait! I had more valuable information for you about BALAS! ``The organization is strongly international in
character, with members from all over the world -- from over 30 countries.''
So why is the website almost entirely in English? Just above this on the
about page: ``BALAS is the first
international business and economics professional association to focus
exclusively on the study of economics,'' -- ah, that explains it --
``management, leadership and industry in Latin America and the Caribbean.''

BALCO

Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. A small nutritional-supplements company
in the San Francisco Bay area, famous for providing performance-enhancing drugs
illegally to professional athletes.

bald

German: `soon.'

bald bodybuilders

Why are there so many? Is it steroids? (I don't know, but FWIW, we've got
an NFL veteran in my club and he's not bald.) Do
bald men disproportionately take up bodybuilding to compensate for hair loss?
Competitive bodybuilders are advised to shave their heads if they can't make
their hair look good in performances (women are assumed to be able to make
their hair look good), but most of the bald bodybuilders I know don't
participate in formal competitions.

I'm still puzzling it out, but in the meantime I discovered that back in 1999,
the Chicago's Lyric Opera needed
a supply of bald bodybuilders for ten performances of Wagner's (or maybe
their) Tristan und Isolde. They were
cast as the ``engine crew''; they rowed the ship in Act I, in time to the
musik. They were lit in red. The compensation was $347.50 per week
plus health and pension coverage. The world is full of amazing job
opportunities.

Baldwin

A good-looking guy. Slang term popularized by (invented for?) the movie
``Clueless'' (1995), a movie
apparently created so Alicia
Silverstone would have something to star in after the Aerosmith videos.
It's an updated Emma. ``What's-her-name's Diary'' (see the World Unclaimed entry) was supposed to
be an updated Pride and Prejudice. (Why don't we just visit Winchester
Cathedral, exhume Jane Austen, and desecrate her grave? Wouldn't that be more
efficient? One-time celebrity girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow played a much
less modernized Emma in
1996.)

Maybe the term is an allusion to Alec Baldwin, and to the fact that he is only
the best known of four brothers in the movie business, so Baldwin begins to
look like a common noun. In 2002, Alec Baldwin was separated from Kim
Basinger and dating Kristin Davis, of the hit TV comedy ``Sex And The City.''
The four female leads on the show were all feuding. Also in 2002, Darren Star,
the creator of ``Sex and the City,'' was planning a television show called Miss
Match, to star Alicia Silverstone in the lead role. (The character's name was
``Kate Fox.'' For more pleasant associations, see
this Fox.) The show's title was evidently a
pun, and for 18 episodes Silverstone played yet another Emma. I heard the show
was flailing in its first season (2003). It was cancelled before I had a
chance to see it; I was still studying the owner's manual of my TV set, trying
to figure out how to set the volume to a negative value.

Look, I don't endorse the term baldwin. I don't even recommend a
capitalization convention for it. The term is here for informational purposes
only, so you can understand when an inferior person uses it unironically.
Cf.Betty.

BALEAP

British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes. You're
probably thinking like, what else for? And why not in Welsh? Giddyap to
EAP.

Features of this book include thoughtful selection of notation, and a clear
introduction of the basics, designed with the goal of presenting classical
and quantum statistical mechanics in a unified formalism. Focus is on
fluids.

A final mortgage payment at the end of the mortgage term that pays
off the outstanding loan in full, or the amount of that payment.

balloon smuggler

A breath-takingly felicitous coinage of S. J.
Perelman. Suitable for a family-oriented piece of rubbish like this webpage,
and yet so extremely euphemistic as to go completely around and be
dysphemistic, like B.O.

Jay
Kardan uses the term ``helium implants'' in
reference to what he deems the ``unnaturally levitating breasts'' of the
ancient Greek sculpted female form. I am reminded of the famous clothed and
naked Maya paintings by Goya. It's noticeable that the clothed Goya
enjoys no support from her clothing. (And you know, I only just now noticed
for the first time that the clothed Maya is wearing a shrug.)

ball-point pen

The main persons credited with invention of the ball-point pen are John J.
Loud, who patented the basic idea in 1888, and Lázló Joszef
Bíro, who patented some essential improvements in 1938 and 1943.
The Internet hosts many contradictory claims about Bíro and the history
of ball-point pens; the situation seems to be even worse than the usual goulash
of errors and sloppiness. In a small effort to decrease the S/N, I will give
some of my sources for the information in this entry.

My main source is The Incredible Ball Point Pen: A Comprehensive History and
Price Guide, by Henry Gostony and Stuart Schneider (G&S). It's ``a
Schiffer Book for Collectors,'' published in 1998.
[Schiffer Publishing,
Ltd., of Atglen, Pennsylvania, happens to have a colophon of a quill pen in
an inkwell, and has published over 3100 titles.]
As the title's missing hyphen suggests, and as scattered errors confirm, the
editing standards are not high. On the other hand, the content of the book is
probably fairly reliable. Gostony and Schneider both have long backgrounds in
pen collecting.

Gostony and Schneider quote Loud (evidently from the US patent): ``My invention
consists of an improved reservoir or fountain pen, especially useful among
other purposes, for marking on rough surfaces--such as wood, coarse
wrapping-paper, and other articles--where an ordinary pen could not be used''
(p. 8).
An
error-riddled article at ideafinder.com claims that John Loud was a tanner,
and that the pen was intended for marking leather, and I have no reason to
suppose that the claim of his having been a tanner was invented from whole...
cloth, let's say. G&S write that Loud made a few pens for himself and used
them for marking boxes, but didn't exploit his patent commercially.

I'll be adding more stuff here as I nail down pesky details. For now let me
just mention that Lázló Bíro, often and reasonably
accurately described as a journalist, was already a successful inventor in
Hungary before he patented a ball-point pen. Vacationing at Lake Balaton (in
western Hungary; it's Eastern Europe's largest lake), he met fellow vacationer
Augustin Justo. Justo was interested in Bíro's invention and suggested
that he move to Argentina -- where Justo happened to be President -- and start
a factory. The situation in Europe deteriorated, and Lázló
Bíro immigrated to Argentina, arriving in 1940. He eventually seems to
have gone by the name José Ladislao Biro, and shortly in this entry I
will switch accent conventions too.

His older brother György Bíro immigrated to Argentina also and was
his business partner in at least one of the ball-point-pen ventures. According
to all sources, György, a chemist, participated in his brother's initial
efforts to invent a new pen, and he is often described as a co-patentor with
his brother. The only relevant information I have on the patent-holder
question is that L.J. Biro was the only patentor on the US patent (number
2,390,636; filed June 17, 1943, granted Dec. 11, 1945). It is sometimes
asserted that the Biros only obtained two patents on ball-point pens. This
seems to be incorrect; an Argentine patent was applied for a week before
the US patent.

Not much information seems to be available about the older Biro, but I'm not
done looking. In the literature on ball-point pens, he is often called Georg
Biro or George Biro. My suspicion is that he went by Jorge Biro after he
immigrated.

Back when David Gottlieb was making his first pinball machines, a Mr.
Malone was one of his salesmen. The Gottlieb machines were selling so well
that manufacture couldn't keep up with demand. Malone designed his own
machine and contracted to have it built. He chose the name from a WWI song Ballyhoo. In the 1960's, Williams
bought Bally's pinball business, and since then Williams and Bally have been
two marques of the Williams company.

You know, when I first checked in May 1997, they didn't have a homepage yet.
It wasn't surprising that the Aerobatic Association (BAeA) had gotten its web act together before BALPA, but
at the time even the Beagle Pup Club had
a homepage.

balshanut

Hebrew: `philology' or `linguistics.' The word may be used for
`etymology,' but Hebrew also has the loan word etimologia if you want to
be more specific. I guess now you're expecting me to find out something about
the etymology of balshanut. All I can tell you is that balsh is
an `investigator, detective, sleuth,' (a sipur balshi is a `detective
novel'), and the -nut ending produces abstract nouns.

Baltimore

The largest city in the state of Maryland (MD).
A number of links for the city are listed by USA Citylink.
The city of Baltimore is named after George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore.
On land it is surrounded almost completely by the administratively independent
entity called Baltimore County. (There's also a Calvert County in Maryland.)
The bulk of Baltimore County stretches from the
Mason-Dixon line at the Pennsylvania border to the north, south to Anne Arundel
County.

[We just happen to have some more detail conveniently supplied by our editorial
and research office (see TK entry). Baltimore
County borders the city of
Baltimore for about 85% of its circumference, but Anne Arundel County reaches
north between two pieces of Baltimore County and touches the south side of the
city (and hence has two separate boundary sections with Baltimore County).
The two points where the three jurisdictions meet are on the river, near I-895,
and in the Bay near the middle of the Francis Scott Key bridge. (Sources: National Geographic Road Atlas,
1999, page 52, and Rand McNally Road Atlas, 1999, p. 46.) On the National
Geographic map I-895 conceals one key part of the county line.)]

You know, a picture tells a thousand words, but takes longer to download.
The boundary of Baltimore City is a polygon -- an irregular heptagon by my
count -- and it pays slight heed to geography. The eastern triple point of
the city of Baltimore with the Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties is in
Patapisco, an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay. The ASCII art below represents the county lines
schematically around that point:

Fort McHenry, at Baltimore, was the scene of a defense during the War of 1812
that inspired Francis Scott Key to write a poem called ``The Star-Spangled
Banner.'' The poem came to be performed as a ballad and is now
the US national anthem.

Balun, balun, BALUN

BALanced-to-UNbalanced. A connector between coax cable and a twisted pair.

The idea behind the name is that a twisted pair is balanced in the sense that
the impedance to ground is the same for the two terminals, whereas for the
electrically asymmetric coax that is not true.

The two configurations -- coax and twisted pair -- represent the two main
alternative approaches used to minimize radiative loss in the transmission
of alternating current power, and
to reduce interference between wirelineAC signals.

BAM

Board-A-Match. A method for scoring duplicate bridge competitions. This
is what Wikipedia calls a stub, as in ``stub your toe.'' More later.

Black AMerica's Political Action Committee. A group affiliated with the
Republican party. As of August 2004, Alvin Williams, a co-founder of the
group, was its president. (We have a
black Republicans entry under
construction.)

BAN

Balkan Academic News.
``[A]n electronic email group encompassing [as of early 2000] over 1300
scholars, activists, government officials, students and others dealing with or
interested in the Balkans. BAN is intended to serve as a network for the
exchange of academic information on the Balkans. It distributes calls for
papers, conference announcements, book reviews, queries and encourages academic
discussion on the region.

Balkan Academic News is part of the Consortium of Minority Resources (COMIR) and affiliated with Southeast European
Politics (SEEP). ''

BAN

Basel Action Network. ``The name Basel
Action Network refers to an international treaty known as the Basel
Convention.'' The idea of the Basel Ban was to ban the export of toxic waste
to developing countries.

BAN

British Approved Name. The generic drug name that is official in the
UK.

Banana

A city at the mouth of the Congo River, on the
Belgian-Congo/Zaïre/Democratic-Republic-of-Congo
(.zr) side.

The name of the fruit entered other European languages from Portuguese. Garcia
de Orta, in his 1563 Simples e Drogues (`Simples and Drugs') 93b, gave ``banana'' as the
fruit's native name in Guinea (Guiné in Portuguese).

In Spanish, la banana (`the banana') is
the fruit of el banano (`the banana tree'). Similarly la
manzana y la naranja (`the apple and the orange') are the fruits of el
manzano y el naranjo (`the apple tree and the orange tree'). This works
for a some other fruit-bearing trees, though certainly not all. This train of
thought is extended at the entry on
gender of fruit and trees.
For a bit more on the initial n in naranja, see the
adder entry.

Bananas are very compelling fruit. For example, they play a pivotal motivating
role for Jordan in Sexing the Cherry.

BANANA

Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. This is the effective
policy that can result from the synthesis of two urban planning philosophies:

Reduce congestion (i.e.: reduce population density in
crowded areas).

Reduce sprawl (i.e.: reduce population density in uncrowded
areas).

There is enough space to institute this policy in the US, which would thence
be regarded as the most advanced BANANA republic. Cf.NIMBY.

banana clip

A magazine or clip, curved so that it
looks a tiny bit like a banana, used on the AK-47.

Kalashnikov designed his machine gun around the new bullet, so the clip
holds the genesis of the gun.

banana plug

A cheap slide-in connector. Do not get this confused with alligator clip,
or you'll end up asking for a banana clip.

There used to be a band named Boston, too. For a very long time, it was
relatively easy to get a book banned in Boston, and publishers would often
make sure to do just that, to attract salacious interest in a book. That's
the legend, anyway. To a certain extent, something similar happens with
movie ratings today: for a certain class of movie, a ``G'' or possibly even
a ``PG'' rating is box-office death. (See MPAA
entry for explanation of rating codes and more.)

As the name for a topographic feature, bank and its Teutonic etymons
were originally applied to any kind of long raised feature such as a ridge or
bank of clouds, and came to be used for the sloping side of such a bank, and
also more generally as any raised feature. The modern word bench is a
cognate. The Teutonic word was borrowed by Late Latin (bancus) and shows up in various
Romance languages with a range of senses that includes bench. (It also shows
up in both male and female forms, apparently reflecting the fact that it had
both male and female gender in some Germanic languages.) Used in the sense of
a tradesman's bench or stall or counter, it eventually took the specialized
sense of a money-changer's table, whence our bank in the financial
sense. In a similar way, in Modern Greek the word trápeza means
both `table' and `bank.'

Bank of Romney

Out on the streets, I don't hear ``as rich as Croesus'' so much any more.
``As rich as Romney'' at least has the advantage of alliteration, and his
campaign in pursuit of the US presidency (ca. 2007-pres.) has increased his
prominence. But that's not what this entry is about.

The Flames of Time (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948) is a
historical novel by Baynard Hardwick Kendrick (1894-1977). The dedication of
the book reads thus:

To
The Bank of Romney (69-192)
Romney, West Virginia
without whose help this book
(and my others) would never
have been written.

That's the only time I can recall ever having seen a book dedicated to a bank.
I appreciate the punctuation.

Bankr.

Bankruptcy Reporter. A legal journal for business ghouls.

Bapedal, BAPEDAL

Badan
Pengendalian
Dampak Lingkungan. The expansion is typically translated
as (Indonesia's) `Environmental Impact
Management Agency' or simply its EPA.
(Pengendalian does seem to be better translated as `Management' or
`Control' than as `Protection.')

Board ARBiter. Controls bus access among different processors on a board.
(Cf.CARB.) Unarbitrated buses are
also used.

barbacoa

I walked into a greasy spoon in the Mexican part of town and read what was
on offer, and this, unfamiliar to me, was one of the items listed. The woman
behind the counter said she didn't know the English translation, and I had
something else. Later I looked it up. In English it's
`barbecue.'

Barbara

A girl's given name, in English, German, and Polish, that is simply the Latin noun barbara, feminine form of
barbarus, meaning `foreigner.' The Latin noun has a Greek etymon with
the same meaning, discussed at the b. entry,
q.v. For more on Barbaras (not Barabas) see the 99 entry.

¡bárbaro!

Spanish interjection well translated as
`terrific!' The English word terrific once meant `terrifying,'
and the Spanish word bárbaro still means, in the appropriate
context, `barbaric, barbarian.' In both cases, the element of emotional
intensity (or rather, of evoking intense emotion) has been retained while the
nature of the evoked emotion has changed entirely. Like terrific,
bárbaro in its approving sense can function as an adjective also.
Its female form is bárbara. If you have not already done so, you
should now read the Barbara entry.

The English word awful has drifted in the opposite semantic direction
from terrific and bárbaro; it originally meant something
like ``awe-inspiring.''

Barbarossa

This is a name that means `Redbeard' in Italian. The Italian spelling has
been partially adopted into English, French, and German, at least. The double
ess makes sense in all four languages, which -- to the extent they are
systematic in the distinction -- use a double ess for an unvoiced sibilant and
a single ess for a voiced sibilant. That's intervocalically, of course; things
may get more complicated initially, finally, and in consonant clusters, but
that happens not to be the issue here. (Note that in English, the unvoiced and
voiced consonants represented by ss and s are often esh and zh rather than ess
and zee. That's when the ``rule'' is followed, of course.) Italian is not
entirely consistent either. For example, the word casa (`house' or
`home') and many related words are pronounced with an unvoiced sibilant.

In Italian, barbarossa is also a common noun. It is applied to various
cherry-red ``uve da tavola'' (`table grapes,' which I take to mean
grapes not used to make wine). The barba (`beard,' of course) refers to
the form of the grape cluster. The name is also applied to the robin (the
orange-breasted thrush).

Old Spanish (Old Castillian, or Aragonese) used
a s/ss distinction similar to that described above, but Modern Spanish, with
fewer sibilants, has no use for ss in its phonetic orthography, and the letter
sequence occurs only in loans and unnaturalized proper nouns. The name with
the same meaning as Barbarossa is written Barbarroja. The rr is
required to preserve the sound of the initial r in roja (`red,' of
course). This is evidently not directly a calque
of the Italian, since roja was roxa (Old Spanish, remember?) when
the last famous Mediterranean Barbarossas lived.
Corominas y Pascual account for the
esh sound represented by the x laconically, by deriving roxo from
Latinrusseus rather than russus. (I
trust the switch to male gender didn't throw you.) The e following the ss
presumably led to palatalization of the ess sound, and that pretty typically
evolves into esh (compare the sounds of ss in express and
expression). (The semantic difference between russus and
russeus, when it was observed, was that the latter represented a less
essential red: `dyed red,' `dressed in red,' or `a partisan of the red faction
in the Circus.')

(The native French form of this name, Barbaroux, is a moderately common
surname. The x in that form is just one of those final letters s that was
converted to x by a stylistic scribal convention, and now it's generally silent
anyway.)

In Spanish, Barbarroja is used to translate the Latin name
Ahenobarbus. Literally, the latter name means `Brassbeard.' Brasses
come in a range of colors (see yellow brass),
so here etymology gives us more precise information than metallurgy. (Hey -- I
didn't claim ``accurate.'') Ahenobarbus was a cognomen of the gens
Domitia. The most famous bearer of this name was Lucius Domitius
Ahenobarbus, born December 15, 37 A.D. His father Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus
died in January 40, and he was adopted by his great-uncle the emperor Claudius,
and is known to history as Nero. He became emperor following the death of
Claudius. His name then was Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus, but it became Nero
Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus at some point. Nero doesn't mean `black.'
It was a cognomen of the Claudian gens. (Nero was the fifth and last Roman
emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.) The word nero is supposed to be
derived from a Sabellic word which they say meant `strong, valiant, happy.' It
sounds like they don't know what it meant. Don't ask me why the cognomen
popped up in the place of a praenomen with this guy. Maybe it was just too
crowded after the gens.

I'm not aware of any other languages that use Barbarroja or
Barbarossa or suchlike to translate Ahenobarbus. However, there
was another Roman Emperor who was known as Barbarossa. That was the
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. Born around 1123, he was the son of Frederick
II, duke of Swabia, and in fact he succeeded upon his father's
death in 1148, becoming Frederick III, duke of Swabia. He only became
Frederick I when he was elected German king and Holy Roman Emperor in 1152
(succeeding his uncle Conrad III). With all those confusing numbers, it was
good he eventually got the byname of Barbarossa. I haven't read
specifically that he had a red beard, or who gave him the name, but he spent
much of his reign fighting wars in Italy. In German he is known as Kaiser
Friedrich I Barbarossa, and the translated form of the byname
(Rotbart) occurs almost exclusively as a gloss. The name
Friedrich means something like `peace ruler,' so there's some irony in
that (see Friedrich). Barbarossa died on June
10, 1190, of drowning, in Salef, in the Kingdom of Armenia (modern
Göksu nehri, in Asia Minor).

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the name Barbarossa was
applied to a couple of brothers who united the Barbary Coast as a Turkish
province. That's an interesting story too, but I'm all researched out, so all
I'll write for now is that the Barbary Coast, and the Berbers, have the names
in European languages that are derived from the Latin barbarus or
something like that, meaning foreigner.

In August 1939, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia concluded a
mutual-nonaggression treaty through their respective henchpeople (I just felt
like neologizing), the German and Soviet foreign ministers Ribbentrop and
Molotov, resp. (Conveniently, Stalin had earlier that year replaced his Jewish
FM, Maxim Litvinov.) There was also a secret protocol that you could think of
as a mutual aggression-against-Poland pact, with related ideas on other small
central and northern European countries. The next week the Germans invaded
Poland, and a couple of weeks later the Soviets did the same. The Soviets were
unexpectedly inefficient in taking the parts of Finland that the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact envision for their side, and after a few weeks Hitler
ordered the first studies that ultimately led to Fall Barbarossa
(`Operation
Barbarossa') -- the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which
began in June 1941. Considering the mix of treacherous intrigue and ruthless
power politics that characterized the Barbarossa of the first Reich, the name
was not inapt.

barbecue

The meaning and origin of this word can be pinned down fairly but not very
precisely. Various forms of the word were apparently in wide use in and around
the Caribbean when the Spanish arrived, and from one or more of these languages
the word entered first Spanish, and then French and English. The word refered
to a frame of sticks used to hold a whole animal for roasting and, by
extension, to the meat of the roasted animal.

barbeque

v.: To char over a puddle of flaming starter fluid. Differs from
flambé by the presence of decorative black stones in the fluid.

n.: An outdoor event where one eats food that smells of kerosene.

Okay, this entry is a joke, but it's not wrong. There just happen to be other
meanings and more common spellings of barbeque (e.g.,
barbecue, q.v.).

Barbie Doll

U.S.: category-killer children's doll from Mattel. The
(flesh-and-blood; not mass-produced) children of creator Ruth Handler
are named Barbara and Ken. Amazing coincidence,
huh? This site will
get you started. This LA
Times reprint will give you the sanitized pro-Barbie take on the German
Lilli doll connection. This item from the Jewish
Forward, of all places, is one article that reveals the truth about Lilli.
You don't have to get up before noon if all you want to do is scoop the LA
Times. (I'm not talking about the time difference here, either.)

Coincidentally, in the almost aboriginal Australian
language family, which is characterised by an extensive system of
highly specialised terms to indicate kinship relations, this term
designates the wife of the man who cooks over a fire of black stones and starter fluid. (If you're actually
interested in Australianese, you could hardly do worse than visit the Polish entry, but it's mentioned there.)

Jack Ryan, a designer who worked on the doll, also worked on a couple of
missiles for the DoD and was married to Zsa Zsa
Gabor for nine months. (That is too long to qualify as ``briefly.'') I don't
know about you, but I see a recurring theme here. Ryan's famous for
patiently and persistently sand-papering the areolae and nipples off the early
models until the Japanese supplier finally got the
idea and stopped painting them on.

Back on topic, the Iranian government was planning (1996) on entering the
highly competitive field of children's dolls, with a much more modest,
dark-haired Barbie doppel, decorously escorted by a male companion who is very
decidedly her own brother and not possibly a romantic interest. As for coif,
one is reminded of the (apocryphal) remark attributed to Henry Ford about the
model T: ``You can have it in any color you like so long as it's black.'' I
wonder how that turned out -- the doll, I mean.

As a matter of record, the model T was offered in other colors for a short
while, but Ford eventually withdrew the option. It has to be remembered that
the model T was not celebrated as a great car -- it was celebrated as a great
car for the price. By a combination of simplified design, mass
production techniques and standardization, and by raw economies of scale, Ford
was able to offer a car so affordable that it changed the automobile from a
rich man's toy to the workingman's horse.

Now where were we? Oh yeah, in some coed parks (!) in Tehran that past (1996)
summer, women were prohibited from riding bicycles. Too sexually provocative.

Barbie was the first children's doll with significant breasts.

In Victorian England, a well-turned table leg was considered too sexually
provocative, so table skirts were invented to hide them. More about this at
the inanimate entry.

BAR/BRI

Largest bar examination review program in US, run by Harcourt Brace. I
think you have to pay if you ever want to learn what the acronym stands for.

Biblical Archaeology Review. Details at entry for more common
abbreviation BAR.

barge pole

(Obs.) A rod for manually propelling a barge. The end
that pushed the bottom typically got mucky.

A hackneyed literary rod for avoiding not even touching things.

Not a lot different than a ten-foot pole.

Barkhausen-Kurtz Oscillations

Oscillation of electrons in a potential minimum generated by grids and
electrodes in a vacuum tube. It's fairly easy to generate B-K oscillations
by biasing the anode of a cylindrical vacuum tube to a negative voltage.
Before the invention of the magnetron (ca. 1922) and the development of the
first practical ones (cavity magnetrons) in 1940, B-K oscillators were the
only source of microwaves in the gigahertz range. Operated in
CW mode, however, they burn out fast. See this page for a bit more.

barleycorn

A seed of the barley plant, and a unit of measure in the ``traditional''
system: Edward I of England standardized the inch to the length of 3 grains of
barleycorn, round and dry, taken from the middle of the plant, and placed end
to end. An interesting footnote (sorry about that, you'll see) is that this
measure (barleycorns) is still used in determining shoe size; the difference
between a size 7 shoe and a size 8 shoe is one barleycorn. For another
seed-related measurement, see carat.

Here is another association of the barleycorn with three and with magnitudes
greater than itself. Robert Burns's version of the ``John Barleycorn'' ballad
begins thus:

There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high;
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.

(Yes, it's later. Burns's years were 1759-1796 and Edward I's 1239-1307;
Burns's version of the ballad was published in 1782. However, there are
earlier versions extant, including one in the Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568.
It's been argued that the songs and personification date back to the
pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons and were adapted for their own purposes by Christian
missionaries. Certainly the surviving versions have obvious Christian symbolic
resonances. And that the number of men who attacked John Barleycorn was three
is traditional. Of course, three is an iconic
number.)

As a unit of length, the barleycorn is still in common use (by me). However,
the barleycorn was once also a unit of weight. Indeed, it still is, but now
it's called a grain (gr.). Here is a snippet of a,
cough, seminal work that makes use of the unit.
More precisely, it's a snippet of P. Fleury Mottelay's translation of the
seminal work of William Gilbert: De Magnete [Book II (no title), Chapter
II (entitled ``Of magnetic coition, and, first, of the attraction exerted by
amber, or, more properly, the attachment of bodies to amber'')].

A loadstone attracts only magnetic bodies; electrics attract everything. A
loadstone lifts great weights; a strong one weighing two ounces lifts half an
ounce or one ounce. Electrics attract only light weights; e.g., a piece of
amber three ounces in weight lifts only one-fourth of a barleycorn's weight.

Sure, ``one-fourth of a barleycorn'' is ``one poppyseed.'' But that's only a
relationship of length units. An avoirdupois ounce is 437.5 barleycorns (that
is, one sixteenth of a regulation 7000-barleycorn pound). Everyone else loves
this stuff... What's your problem?

[A note on the language: William Gilberd (that's how he wrote his name) lived
from 1544 to 1603, and his opus magn(etic)um was published in 1600 in Latin. Although in Elizabethan times all learned men
studied Latin and most of them remembered some of it, there were at first many
calls for an English translation to be made. This did not occur in a timely
manner. Then, around the time of the three-hundredth anniversary of the first
publication, two translations appeared almost simultaneously.

Barlow's Rule

Atomic volume is proportional to an atom's lowest valence. This is
very, very approximate.

It's aptly named, for it does represent an enormous total cross section for
any non-Coulombic nuclear scattering process. A Stammtisch member seems to
recall, however, that Eugen Wigner disapproved of the term.

...barring unforeseen circumstances

...excuses have not yet been constructed, but we're working on it.

BARRITT

BARRier Injection Transit Time (diode). Like the IMPATT diode, this has a negative AC resistance: current and voltage are about 180°
out of phase.

bar rush

The increase in traffic at restaurants that are open as the bars are
closing. In South Bend, Indiana, for example,
closing time is 3 am. (This happens to coincide with the time when the
sale of alcohol becomes illegal for a few hours. Hmm.) At one all-night
restaurant I know there, the front-of-the-house staff is not allowed
to go on break at any time between 2:30 and 4:00 am.

BARSC

The Boston Area Roman Studies Conference. A conference held each year in
April, it was
``instituted in
1995 to promote the study of Latin literature and Roman culture, to
increase the visibility of these studies in the New England scholarly community
and to provide a place for area Latinists and Romanists to meet, socialize, and
exchange ideas.'' It's sponsored by the
Department of Classical Studies and
the Humanities Foundation of Boston University.
``The conference is open to anyone interested and is free of charge.
Following the conference is a dinner, and those wishing to attend must
pre-register.'' There's a charge for that.

[One shouldn't worry too much about distinguishing adjectival constructions
(deep-voiced) from nominal constructions (deep-voiced one). In
Ancient Greek, adjectives and nouns constituted a single part of speech,
somewhat as adjectives and adverbs constitute a single part of speech in
German. Hence the enigmatic occurrence of such profound-seeming locutions as
``the hot,'' ``the dry,'' ``the cold,'' ``the wet'' in ancient Greek natural
philosophy.]

From at least the fourth century to the second century, it was common to call a
bad theater actor a `groaner'
(barustonos), apparently a pun based on the idea that actors would like
to be thought of as deep-voiced.

``Hello?''
``Yes?'' What are they selling this time?
``Hello? Is this Dorothy?''Lady, I sing baritone when I can get up that high. Do
I sound to you like Judy Garland? ``There's no
Dorothy here.''
``Oh. I guess I have the wrong number, then.''We're not in Kansas
anymore.

BAS

Biblical Archaeology
Society. ``[F]ounded in 1974 as a nonprofit, nondenominational,
educational organization dedicated to the dissemination of information about
archaeology in the Bible lands.''

BAS

Big-Ass Smile. The second word is just an intensifier. There is no
suggestion that this is the body part or animal that does the smiling.

The traditional material used as touchstone (q.v.), a velvet-black
siliceous variety of quartz.
The name comes from the Latinbasanites [lapis] (occurring in Pliny),
from the Greek básanos, `touchstone, test.' Every time I add an
entry like this, I think of half-a-dozen
more I have to add before your education will be complete.

bascaro, basta

What, didn't you go directly from the bas entry to
the dosta entry? What the heck crazy order are
you reading these entries in anyway?

base

A chemical which, in a particular reaction, releases an OH- ion
or accepts a proton, or (Lewis definition) donates an electron pair.
Cf.acid. In an acid-base reaction, or in
an acid-base step of a reaction, no chemical species changes its valence.
Alkalis constitute a subset of the bases.
Properly speaking, they constitute a proper subset.

B.A.S.E.

Building and Achieving Self-Esteem.

Every day, in every way, I am becoming better and better.

Wow, what an energy rush!

BASE

Building, Antenna-tower, Span, Earth. An acronym summarizing perilous
places to parachute-jump from (``span'' for bridge; ``earth'' for cliff).
Jumping from these places is called BASE jumping (or just base jumping) or
attempting suicide.

It takes time and drop-distance (and separation from jumping-off point) to
deploy a parachute, and also some time for a parachute to slow one's descent,
so lower jump-off points are more dangerous. Base jumps ought to be ranked on
the basis of how much they increase surviving-population
IQ. (Cf.Darwin Awards.)

baseband signal

A signal centered on or near zero frequency (rather than a carrier
frequency).

For example, standard NTSC TV receivers use an
intermediate frequency (IF) of 44 MHz. The audio and video are encoded as modulations of
that signal. The extracted audio and video signals, which have a much lower
frequency range, are called baseband signals.

Based on a true story.

Untrue.

basement

A floor below ground level (``below grade,'' as realtors say), forming the
foundation of a building above. Most single-family homes are built either on a
basement or on a slab. Basements on SFH's seem to
be of three main types: full-block construction, partial-block construction,
and poured. Block construction refers to concrete blocks; partial-block
basements are partially poured. In the US, poured basements became common in
the 1960's. Intermediate in type between a ground-level foundation and a
basement is a Michigan basement.

I'm told that in Indiana, it's illegal to include the below-grade floor space
in quoting the square-footage of a home (in the multiple listings, I guess),
even if the basement is finished. If the house is not built on level ground,
of course, things can get complicated.

When a house is extended sideways, it is typical not to enlarge the basement.
It used to be common to create a crawl space under the extension -- a
concrete-block wall around the perimeter of the extension supporting it above
the ground, which might be excavated a little to leave about a meter of space
between the extension floor and the soil. The ``crawl space'' (beneath the
extension, enclosed by the blocks) would be accessible through an opening
(typically a meter square) along the top of the basement wall. I don't know
how typical all this is; most of the crawl spaces I've ever seen have been in
Westfield, New Jersey. Nowadays, and probably since poured concrete became
common in residential construction, extensions are typically built on slabs.

The Spanish word for basement is
sótano (< Latin * subtulus
< subtus `under'). Another word traced to subtus through an
unattested derivation within Latin is sotana (< * subtana),
for a floor-length garment, traditionally referring to a vestment worn by
priests. It also referred to academic gowns, when academics wore them.

BASF

Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik.

BASH

Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard. I know about water hazards and sand traps,
but this seems a bit speculative. Oh wait-- that's ``bird,'' not ``birdie''!
Never mind.

bash

(GNU) Bourne Again (Unix) SHell. (The
commercial Bourne shell is sh.) The bash shell takes some features
from the Korn shell and the (t)c-shell.

BASIC

Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The first (computer)
language I learned. Sort of a simplified Fortran, but they kept adding features...

For a bit of the prehistory of BASIC, see the DART
entry. See also Visual Basic.

A name like BASIC makes possible a book title like Elementary
BASIC (1985), ``as chronicled by [Dr.] John H. Watson. Edited with
commentaries'' by Henry Ledgard & Andrew Singer. The conceit of the book
is that Holmes might use the Analytic Engine to solve mysteries, helpfully
explaining his methods to Dr. Watson. Too much sugar coating and not enough
bitter pill for my taste, but every intellectual palate must be served.

BASIC

Book And Serial Industry
Communications. The standards forum of BISG --
mostly concerned with electronic technology standards. Formed by the merger of
BISAC and SISAC in
fall 1998. Standards developed earlier and associated with the BISAC or
SISAC name retain their earlier designations.

BASIC

Brazil, South Africa, India, and China. Well, ``basic'' is easier to
pronounce than ``bsaic.''

You know, you can't have enough organizations named BASIC. There's a student
organization at Siena College that's called
``Brothers And SIsters for Christ.'' That looks like a theogenetic problem to
me.

Basic

British American Scientific International Commercial. A backronym for the word Basic in Ogden's Basic English (q.v.). FWIW,
science and nation occur in the Basic vocabulary. If we accept
the proper nouns Britain and America, then the expansion above might be
rendered in Basic (put into Basic) as ``of science, nations, trade,
Britain, and America.''

The ``installed base,'' so to speak, of English speakers, and the extreme lack
of inflection in English (compared to other European languages) have motivated
other attempts to create an international auxiliary language based in some way
on English. The other successful effort (popular until Esperanto swept all
before it) was Volapük. However, that language is unacceptable because in
it my surname means `criminal.' The language E-prime is, like Basic, a subset
of English (but devised on different principles). In the early 1960's, Basic
(i.e., Basic English) influenced Alan Kay in his creation of the
computer language Smalltalk.

Basically, ...

A sentence adverb that introduces an underinformed attempt at explanation.
E.g., ``Basically, a partition is a number. Basically, like, a partition is a
member of a partition. Basically, it's like this. Basically, hmmm, let me
ostentatiously ponder the problem until you figure out the answer and I take
credit for telling you how.''

If you're in a public computing lab with one of these loud verbal gorillas,
wait it out. He'll quiet down as soon as his confident suggestion clearly
fails to work.

Oops, louder again. ``Basically, Nr gets Bigger,
you want to get it to come down.'' See, that number is
bigger.

The other thing you hear a lot in a computer lab is people repeating their
previous statements with should inserted, or just saying ``well that
should work... God how I hate hacking other people's code!'

Basic English

Basic English is a restricted
subset of English, created primarily by C. K. Ogden and unleashed on the world
in 1931. Also called Basic
(q.v.). It created a buzz of enthusiasm that seems to have peaked in
the mid-1940's. (Devoted Basic-Englishists can no doubt adduce tendentious
evidence to contradict this.) Here from Ogden's The System of Basic
English (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934) is the potted FAQ answer to the
question ``What is Basic English?''

Basic English is a careful and systematic selection of 850
English words which will cover those needs of everyday life for which a
vocabulary of 20,000 words is frequently employed. Thse words are not the
words most commonly used, as determined by word-counts; but all of them are
common, and more than 600 of them are constantly used by an English or American
child of six.

There are 200 names of picturable objects, and
400 other names of things;
making
600 nouns in all.
There are 150 adjectives.
The remaining 100 words put these names and adjectives into
operation, so that the whole system may work as normal English.

It might not be remiss to quote the answer to the second question, ``What is
its purpose?''

Basic English has two chief purposes:

To serve as an international auxiliary language; that is to say, a second
language for use throughout the world in general communication, commerce, and
science.

To provide a rational introduction to normal English; both as a first step,
complete in itself, for those whose natural language is not English, and as a
grammatical introduction, encouraging clarity of thought and expression, for
English-speaking peoples at any stage of proficiency.

Here is a paragraph from The Shape of Things to Come, a bit of
speculative future history that H.G. Wells published in 1933. (Yes, I'm aware
of the term ``science fiction.'')

Basic English was the invention of an ingenious scholar of
Cambridge in England, C. K. Ogden (1889-1990), who devoted a long and
industrious life to the simplification of expression and particularly to this
particular simplification. It is interesting to note that he was a
contemporary of James Joyce (1882-1955), who also devoted himself to the task
of devising a new sort of English. But while Ogden sought scientific
simplification, Joyce worked aesthetically for elaboration and rich suggestion,
and vanished at last from the pursuit of his dwindling pack of readers in a
tangled prose almost indistinguishable from the gibbering of a lunatic.
Nevertheless he added about twenty-five words to the language which are still
in use. Ogden, after long and industrious experimentation in the reverse
direction, emerged with an English of 850 words and a few rules of construction
which would enable any foreigner to express practically any ordinary idea
simply and clearly. It became possible for an intelligent foreigner to talk or
correspond in understandable English in a few weeks. On the whole it was more
difficult to train English speakers to restrict themselves to the forms and
words selected than to teach outsiders the whole of Basic. It was a teacher of
languages, Rudolph Boyle (1910-1959), who contrived the method by which English
speakers learnt to confine themselves, when necessary, to Basic limitations.
This convenience spread like wildfire after the First Conference
of Basra. It was made the official medium of communication throughout the
world by the Air and Sea Control, and by 2020 there was hardly anyone in the
world who could not talk and understand it.

Working approximately backwards through this to elucidate some references --
The First Conference at Basra in 1965 was a ``conference of scientific and
technical
workers ... regarded by historians as a cardinal date in the emergence of the
Modern State.'' The beginning of the world government that Wells (1866-1946)
envisioned. Boyle is, of course, a fiction. The real James Joyce did not
enjoy the long life Wells assigned him here, dying in 1941.
Charles Kay Ogden actually died in 1957.

Some day I'll flesh out the actual history of Basic English. For now I
should mention that I.A. Richards, who had
collaborated with Ogden on The Meaning of Meaning (1923), also
collaborated with him on the research that led to the creation of Basic
English, though Richards credited the invention primarily to Ogden's
resourceful ability to express the greatest variety of thoughts with the
smallest vocabulary. (This was a compliment.) From my understanding, it is
not entirely a travesty to use of the word ``scientific'' to describe the
engineering feat that was the creation of Basic English. One of its striking
features is that the basic vocabulary contains a negligible number (18, I
think) of pure verbs (not counting their in-many-cases irregular conjugations).

Winston S. Churchill gave a boost to Basic English when he received an honorary
degree at Harvard University on September 5, 1943. September is a strange time
to receive a degree, but the exigencies of war bent all schedules. Churchill
took the occasion of his acceptance speech to tout Basic, which fit well with
his cherished vision of the unity of the English-speaking peoples. He
described it as ``a very carefully wrought plan for an international language,
capable of very wide transactions of practical business and of interchange of
ideas ... a medium of intercourse and understanding to many races and an aid to
the building of our new structure for preserving peace.'' It doesn't sound
like his best stuff, but the speech was broadcast and heard by millions in the
US, and the interest it stirred led to newspaper articles well into 1944 on the
subject of Basic English.

Part of his argument was like a qualitative version of Metcalfe's Law: that the adoption of English
as the universal language (to be accelerated through the use of Basic
English) would increase the value of English to those already using it. His
speech that day contained an obvious allusion to Lincoln's second inaugural
address, also delivered in wartime. (``Let us go forward in malice to none and
good will to all.'') This probably gets you to wondering about the famous and
variously attributed ``[America and Britain] ... divided by a common language''
line. The status quaestionis of that quotation's origin is
summarized
here.

Subsequently, Churchill continued to press within the British government for
possible application of Basic English, such as possible radio broadcasts by the
BBC. When a grateful nation swept Churchill out
of office (I mean every word of this) in elections shortly following the
victorious conclusion of WWII in Europe, government
bureaucrats were generally relieved to be relieved of the need to humor his
minor obsession with Basic.

Texts originally written in Basic English can be quite graceful and fluent, but
it is often hard to tell to what extent the author has allowed the vocabulary
limitations to restrict what is written. Translations of ordinary English into
Basic are often inaccurate, stilted, or absurd. Ridicule based on such stilted
translations is the immediate reaction of many English-speakers introduced to
Basic. Translations into Basic (``writing put into Basic,'' as one would say
in Basic) grind down to flatness any fine gradations of meaning. Such
gradations do not fail to exist just because they cannot be expressed, so one
immediately suspects that texts originally written in Basic are in some sense
also inaccurate despite the impression of fluency and naturalness. (No one
denies that using Basic entails trade-offs; the argument is only over when and
to what extent these trade-offs are worthwhile.)

A loss of nuance is also an important (but intentional) feature of Newspeak,
the official language George Orwell outlined as
the speech of the dystopia Oceania in his Nineteen
Eighty-Four. The idea of Newspeak arose from his analysis of the
relationship between speech and totalitarianism, as partly described in his
famous essay, ``Politics and the English Language.'' There seems to be no
direct evidence that Orwell intended Newspeak as a criticism of Basic English,
though it must be noted that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published late in
1949 and he died early in 1950. I suspect that, in any case, the Basic English
fad had already peaked by 1949. Nevertheless, the criticism inherent in the
Newspeak travesty may have tainted Basic English to some degree.

The day when the Bastille was stormed in 1789: July 14. The Bastille was
a fortress originally built to defend Paris, but by early in the eighteenth
century was a prison. It had been a political prison, and its storming was
quickly taken to mark the start of the French Revolution. Here's a good page
on it.

They sometimes write it in capitals, but Bata is just the surname of Tomas
Bata, who in 1894 founded the Bata Shoe
Organization in Zlin, a town in the present-day Czech Republic. The
Bata Shoe Museum is at 327 Bloor
Street West, corner with St. George -- you can't miss it, the
building looks like it was damaged in
a quake -- something Toronto envies San Francisco, I guess. The museum
is just three blocks from the ROM. On your way,
stop at the Bob Miller Book Room (180 Bloor West). You could also go five
blocks south from the BATA to the University of Toronto bookstore at St. George
and College Streets, which incidentally occupies part of the old premises of
the city's central library. Gee, I hope they didn't tear down the shelving.
Atticus bookshop on Harbord is also recommended. Abelard
too. One of the world's steepest gradients of booktownishness comes somewhere
between Toronto and Buffalo. Toronto is a pretty good book town. At least it
was about five years ago. There aren't so many small bookstores now that they
have two competing superbookstore chains, though. They lost the whole
Lichtman's chain, and Britnell's, and a bunch of lesser stores. One of the
big unheralded events of 2000 was that the big chains (and the big online
bookstores) quietly eliminated discounts on most of their books, now offering
deep discounts only on best-sellers. Can you say p r e d a t o r yp r i c i n g? Sure you can!

Last time I was in Toronto, there was a book store there that advertised
itself as the largest in the world or something. Ignore it. It has the
biggest ratio of aisle width to shelf height of any book store in the world.
For a great bookstore with towering inaccessible bookshelves, try Powell's in Portland, Oregon.

Uh-oh. Looks like another
emergency-candies situation. Turns out that World's Biggest
Bookstore is just its name, not its claim. Grumble. Had a couple of us
fooled there.

The following comments are more relevant than they seem yet:
In English spelling, the letters b and p generally represent essentially the
same consonant. B is a voiced bilabial stop, and p is a voiceless bilabial
stop. All that means is that any vowel adjacent to b is pronounced 20 to
30 milliseconds closer to the consonant articulation than it would be adjacent
to a p. In Arabic (at least as spoken in North Africa), and in Hebrew as
spoken by North African immigrants to Israel, there is no phonemic b/p
distinction. For an example of how this plays out, see the SG entry.

The reason I bring up the similarity of the consonants b and p is that in
Spanish, pata
means `paw, foot.'

The letter b in Spanish happens to represent a sound that is usually not a
stop, but like the sound we represent by v. It is neither b nor v, however:
it's produced bilabially like English b, whereas English v is produced
labiodentally. In the IPA, that sound is
represented by the Greek letter beta.

There's a similar, less discernible distinction with f. In Japanese, the sounds we distinguish as h and f are
considered equivalent, with transliteration based mostly on the vowel sound
following it (Japanese consists essentially of consonant-vowel syllables).
Followed by u, it's interpreted as f (e.g., Fuji), followed by i, it's an h.
Hence, coffee is kohi. These transliterations represent tendencies in
the sound of the consonant. What is not so obvious is that the articulation is
essentially that which English uses for h. With a front vowel like /i:/, the
point of articulation moves forward to the lips. That yields a sound like our
f, even though our f is articulated labiodentally. It's the sound of a blown
kiss. (Not just any blown kiss; a blown kiss that's all blowing.) In the IPA,
the bilabially articulated Japanese f-sound is written with a Greek letter phi.
Japanese speakers who learn a European second language after infancy tend to
use the bilabial f in the second language. That tends to be tiring for the
speaker, because it requires greater aspiration to produce the same volume of
sound. It's like loud whispering.

[An indication of the close relationship of eff and aitch sounds can be seen
in a large class of English words that end in -gh. At one time, English had
the aitch-like sound /x/ (represented by "ch" in German Bach
and Irish loch) and the similar but more closed /ç/ (also
represented by "ch" in German word Licht, cognate with
English `light'). As these sounds disappeared from English, they were
replaced (if at all) by the closest available sound: eff. Hence the modern
pronunciations of cough, enough, rough, and tough.]

BTW, zapato means `shoe,' but un pato is a drake. A
zapata is also one or another kind of shoe, but mostly it's a half-boot,
what we used to call a chukka in the Boy Scouts.
You're probably thinking that una pata should mean a duck, but no, it
just means `paw' or `foot.' Remember
that nouns for most wild animals have fixed grammatical gender in Spanish:
females as well as males of the duck persuasion are patos, not
patas (if you want to specify, a drake is a pato macho and a
duck is a pato hembra). Incidentally, y'know there's no really
convenient way of translating webbed feet into Spanish. I suppose you
could call them patas de pato.

Emiliano Zapata led a popular rebellion in southern Mexico. It began in
1910 against long-time dictator Porfirio Díaz, and continued during a
succession of elected and non-elected leaders. There's a bit more about this
time period in the PRI entry. The BATA has
neither los zapatos de Zapata nor las zapatas de Zapata. Not
even las zapatillas de Zapata (his slippers). Their collection is not
strong on Mexican military foot fashions, but they do have shoes of that
general vintage. See? I'm not off-topic, I'm just a bit round-about. The
BATA has 10,000 shoes in its collection. By my estimate, that comes to, in
round numbers you understand, about 5000 pairs, more or less well-matched.
Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos left behind 1500 pairs when her husband
Ferdinand was deposed.

Come back in a few months, when we add exciting new material on Ernesto
Zedillo and the cedilla.

You know, the lady from the teaching effectiveness program said you have to
dramatize numbers, because numbers don't mean anything to people like her.
Okay, so she didn't say that exactly, but that's what she meant even though
she didn't know it. Lessee now, suppose Mrs. Marcos had left behind 1500
pears instead. In a walk-in refrigerator. You could have eaten four
pears a day for a year and still had enough left over to plant an orchard
even if you didn't save the seeds from the pears you ate.

Ed Sullivan always had a ``really, really big shoe for you tonight,'' but the
time that Elvis Presley performed, the broadcast
didn't show any part of him
below the waist. It's not as if he left his fly open by accident or anything.

As you will recall from the beginning of the entry, the Bata shoe company was
founded by one Tomas Bata in Zlin. One Tomas Straussler was born in
Zlin on July 3, 1937, the younger son of Eugene Straussler, who was a physician
for the Bata company. I don't understand why Bata had one or more company
physicians, but for his own and his family's health and safety, Eugene was
transferred to Singapore in 1939. This didn't work out so well for him
personally, as he was killed there in 1942 when the Japanese invaded. His wife
and two sons had been evacuated to India. There
Martha Straussler eventually married Kenneth, an officer in the British army.
The sons adopted their stepfather's surname, and Tomas Straussler became Tom
Stoppard.

Early in 1938, my mother was also in Czechoslovakia. ``Stateless in Prague
(1938)'' doesn't have the same melifluousness as ``Sleepless in Seattle (1993),'' but
it does have its poignancy and cause for sleeplessness. My mother was on the
last flight out before Germany occupied the
Sudetenland. There's no little irony in the fact that this occupation, the
result of Neville (``Peace for our time'') Chamberlain's infamous appeasement
in Munich, was ostensibly needed to protect Germans in Czechoslovakia. When I
mentioned Bata shoes to my mother, she looked puzzled for a moment and then
corrected me. I meant ``Batya'' shoes. Turns out that in Czech, Bata is
spelled Bat'a. Oh yes, they're world famous. She bought a pair in New York when she visited in 1954. I prefer Clarks
(see this E entry to learn why).

Bata shoes is all about pronunciation. It might be the ideal shoe for when
you need to put your foot in your mouth.

Other people who took the opportunity to leave central Europe around that time
included the Biro brothers, mentioned at the
ball-point pen entry. My friend Lisbeth Brodie did not have that
opportunity. After surviving the Warsaw ghetto uprising, she ended up in
the Czech town of Terezin, Theresienstadt in German, about forty
miles from Prague. She always wore long-sleeve blouses. In her last years, at
the invitation of the state of New Jersey, Lisbeth
would go around to local schools and describe her experiences.

She told me that one question children would ask, that she knew she could not
answer in a way to make them understand, was how she had felt. One felt
nothing, one's feelings died. That is not exactly true, of course. In the
rooms after morning roll call, she and her fellow prisoners would dance, to
celebrate surviving another day alive. On May 8, 1945, she celebrated
liberation by the Red Army. For this she had food, a rich feast: a bar of
butter. An incomplete meal for an incomplete party; she was the only survivor
of her family in Poland. She eventually got to the US, where she made a life
as a nursery school teacher (including mine, when I first arrived in the US).
As she lay dying on Tuesday, May 16, 2001, we and her closest family -- an
English cousin -- quietly celebrated her life and her ninetieth birthday. She
died the following Friday morning.

British American Tobacco COmpany. Nowadays it calls itself ``British
American Tobacco'' and is a ``group'' -- a
UK-based conglomerate (British American Tobacco plc, which is of course a
company) of tobacco companies in 66 countries (as of 2004) around the world.

BATF

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Someone seeking a connection among these three items may think of health
dangers, but that is an anachronistic view in two respects. First, because
at the time that the BATF was formed, tobacco was not considered an in-any-way
dangerous substance. Second, because these are not the most dangerous
substances today either. As Warren Zevon has pointed out in a song, the
really dangerous items are lawyers, guns and money.

At the time that the BATF was formed, these three items (A, T, and F) were the
most prominent federally-taxed items. Nor was the US the only country in which
this was ever true. More recently, Gorbachev's early campaign against heavy
drinking and alcoholism redounded in significantly reduced tax revenues for the
USSR. A letter revealed in a recent new biography
of Stalin shows that when he was contemplating ways to raise money for the
coming war with Germany (known as the ``Great
Patriotic War'' in the old USSR; WWII elsewhere), he considered promoting greater consumption of
alcohol. In China, a corresponding rôle is played by cigarettes.

Technically, the correct acronym is NOT `BATF' but
`ATF' (q.v.). Now you know.

Batrachomyomachia. It's clear that, if you're looking for a title
to abbreviate, this is a good choice. Batr. is a mock epic; the title is Greek
for ``The Battle of the Frogs and Mice.'' (For your entertainment, the
Let's
be friends blog has a page with a picture of a mouse riding a frog.)

The Romans generally believed that Batr. had been written by Homer.
Considering that various elements of it parody the
Iliad (as well as the Homeric cycle), this is as
much as to say that Homer parodied his own great epic. It says something about
the Romans that they thought this. Plutarch attributed the work to Pigres of
Halicarnassus, brother or son of Artemisia, queen of Caria. I hope you find
that illuminating. Halicarnassus was an Greek city on the coast of Caria (an
ancient region of southwest Asia Minor), and this Pigres is also called Pigres
of Caria. The
Suda agrees on the authorial attribution, but given the derivative nature
of the Suda and the prominence of Plutarch, that might not count as
corroboration.

Interestingly, FROG and SPIDER are competing methods in the measurement of
laser chirp.

Believe me, if I knew some way of working mice in there that wasn't WIMPy, I'd have done it.

Ángel María Ganivet García was a Spanish writer and a
diplomat who represented his country in Antwerp, Helsinki, and Riga. He
published a book called
Ideárium Español, and Miguel de Unamuno replied to it in
three letters which he also published in the periodical El Defensor.
Ganivet responded to this with an extended essay addressed to Unamuno, entitled
El Porvenir de España (`The Future of Spain'). By the way, my
friend Vladimir's sister-in-law did her dissertation on Unamuno. One day we
were driving in Washington, D.C., and I remarked about a statue that it
reminded me of Unamuno, and she turned and asked me why. (I wasn't aware until
later that she had a particular interest in Unamuno.) I explained that it was
the grave, thoughtful attitude (I meant posture) that reminded me of a statue
of Unamuno that I had seen in Spain. This personal bit of trivia involving a
woman whose name I can't even remember is of no possible interest to you, but I
don't have any other place to mention it. The take-home is that once, at
least, I actually did have a life. No wait, let me try that again. The
take-home is that Unamuno was a famous Spanish
philosopher. Here's a quick passable translation [original follows] of the
first paragraph of Ganivet's essay:

I have not forgotten, friend and companion Unamuno, those afternoons of
which you remind me, nor those café chats, nor those strolls through
La Castellana when, with the enthusiasm and earnestness of students just
out of the classrooms, we reformed our country according to our whim. I still
recall your projects of those days. Among them the one that most interested me
was that of publishing the Batrachomyomachia of Homer (or whomever),
with illustrations by yourself. To bring off this arduous enterprise with
panache, you studied in depth the anatomy of mice and frogs. Whatever came of
that interest? On the marble table of the café you painted a frog for
me with such consummate skill that I have not been able to forget it: I still
see it staring fixedly at me, as if it wanted to eat me with its bulging eyes.

I can save you the trouble: Ganivet doesn't mention the Batr. anywhere else in
the essay.

BATRAC

Bilateral Arm Training with Rhythmic Auditory Cueing. A physical therapy
strategy for stroke victims, involving coordinated arm movement in time with a
metronome. Both arms are exercised although only one has been debilitated by a
stroke. It had been accepted that post-stroke rehabilitation plateaus after
about three months, but significant improvements have been demonstrated with
BATRAC more than two years after a stroke (research reported June 2004 at the
fifth International Stroke Society World Congress in Vancouver, B.C.).

It does not work. This a technical usage, a term of art among flea
marketers (also flee marketers). Granted, the meaning is not intuitive, but
it's perfectly honest, because everybody uses the same terminology, so you
ought to know it. (You should also know the longer alternative form, ``It
works, it just needs batteries.'') On the other hand, ``It works, it
just needs a cord'' means `irreparable, use for parts.' ``Needs repair'' means
`not good even for parts; throw it in the front yard for the kids to play with,
near the car that's up on blocks.

battery

History here (electrical batteries in the modern sense below):

In its original sense, battery was the name of the action of battering
or beating, or of the apparatus for doing it. The word has been used
figuratively, and the meaning has also been extended in many special
applications where some kind of force is applied repeatedly. This kind of
usage seems to have been especially popular in the nineteenth century, when
battery was used in baseball for pitchers and later for pitcher-catcher pairs,
in astronomy for series of lenses, and in mining for rock-pulverizing mills
with multiple ``stamps'' (hammers). Perhaps the most widely used extended
sense of the word bequeathed us by the twentieth century is represented
in ``a battery of [typically psychological, intelligence, or clinical] tests.''

The current principal sense of battery is that of a kind of
self-contained electrochemical power source. This goes back to Benjamin
Franklin. In 1748, or at least no later than that, he introduced the term into
electricity in the sense of multiple capacitors connected in series. The idea
was that if you charge a number of capacitors (often Leyden jars) separately or
in parallel up to some voltage, then a multiple of them in series gives a
multiple of the voltage.

When Franklin was doing his pioneering experiments with electricity, triboelectricity (q.v.; typically
amber or glass rubbed with fur) was the main
source of practical electric energy. (Lightning was not very practical except
as an unusual way to kill yourself.) If you wanted higher voltage, a battery
of capacitors was your option. Apart from that application, there's not much
call for hooking a number of capacitors up in series: it yields a smaller
capacitance, and an easier way to make a smaller capacitance (though with a
lower voltage rating) is simply to make a smaller (less cross-sectional area)
capacitor.

Electronics has progressed somewhat since the eighteenth century, and we no
longer use the word battery for capacitors in series. I'm not going to get
into a detailed analysis of just how capacitors are used today. There are some
situations where it's appropriate to use capacitors in series, and capacitors
(modern ultracapacitors) are again used as temporary power supplies in some
applications. But now the word battery is used for electrochemical cells.

Today, if you have to work with a fixed-voltage source and you need a higher
voltage, you just use a step-up transformer. (You can used it essentially
directly for an AC source. If your source is DC, you use it to power an inverter, producing AC to
feed the primary of the step-up transformer. If you need DC out, you can
rectify on the secondary side of the transformer. See DC/DC converter.)

Modern electrical batteries (first the boring historical stuff):

Toward the end of the

[under construction]

Modern electrical batteries (now the boring technical stuff):

The two idealized kinds of DC power supply are constant-current
and constant-voltage sources. An ordinary chemical battery can be well
represented by a constant-voltage source in series with an internal resistance
or equivalently by a constant-current source with a parallel internal
resistance. At the circuit-theoretic level, they are equivalent. Any such
DC power supply will have a maximum voltage (at zero current: open circuit)
and a maximum current (at zero voltage: shorted).

(This interchangeability of current-source and voltage-source circuit models
is quite general. In the small-signal analysis of a transistor circuit, one
uses both voltage-controlled current-source models and current-controlled
voltage-source models, choosing mainly for convenience of calculation. Of
course, nowadays most people just use a simulator like SPICE.)

The voltage of a single chemical cell is determined by the
redox reaction it relies on. That voltage is less
than or equal (ideally) to the energy per electron transfer, so it is on the
order of one volt. The standard lead-acid reaction yields the standard cell
voltage of 1.5 V, the alkaline cells that over recent years have
almost completely replaced this in consumer devices have similar voltages.
Different-size cells (``1.5-volt batteries'') differ in the area of their
electrodes. Cells of increasing size (AAAA,
AAA, AA, A, B, C, D)
can supply increasing amounts of current. One can think of a large cell as
composed of smaller cells in parallel (individual cells connected
anode-to-anode, cathode-to-cathode). A number N of equivalent cells in
parallel yields an N-fold increase in maximum current. If one regards the
cells as constant-voltage sources with series internal resistances, one can
regard the N-fold increase as arising from the reduced internal resistance: the
N internal resistances in parallel have an overall resistance of 1/N of their
individual resistances.

By combining chemical cells in series one creates a ``battery.'' The term
battery was borrowed from military usage by Benjamin Franklin, whose book on
electricity was the vade mecum of
``electricians'' (researchers into electricity) through the end of the
eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Like a military battery, a
chemical battery combines the force of the individual cells to produce a
greater force -- voltage, in this case. In a battery, the cells are connected
in series. All commercial nine-volt
batteries are made of six 1.5-volt cells in series. Car batteries are
really batteries. Nowadays 12 volts has become the virtually universal
standard, as far as I can tell, with the car chasis connected to the negative
pole. However, there have been positive-ground cars, and I seem to recall my
mother's 1964 Plymouth Valiant had a six-volt battery.

From the user's standpoint, there is little or no difference between a battery
and a single voltaic cell, so it is natural (especially given the many other
uses of the word cell) that the word battery should have come to be
used for both. However, a number of cells in parallel is not what Franklin
had in mind by ``battery.''

baud

Voltage-level changes per second. This is not the same as the data
rate or bit rate. For example, it can be twice the bit
rate if simple return-to-zero encoding is used.
[Pronounced ``bawd.'']